Archive for the ‘CyberSociology’ Category

Preface:

In the past I have written about “The Ghost In The Shell” referring to current incidents online and the future of network warfare. I mostly wrote about the anime show’s prescience with regard to the fact that many of us in the business of computer security it seems gravitated to it because of those very scenarios in the first place and a certain cool factor to them. Of course all of that was science fiction and it could not happen in the real world could it?

Well, once upon a time the idea of a plane flying in the air or a submarine for that matter were pure SCIFI and now we take them for granted. So it is too with some of the ideas put forth by G.I.T.S. where online culture and warfare are concerned. If you are not familiar with the G.I.T.S. franchise I suggest you go to Amazon or Hulu and watch them all. If you are familiar with them, then you might have the same “Ah ha!” reaction that I did watching the evolving story of the Sony hack.

SONY HACK

So to catch you all up, Sony it seems got hacked. Not just hacked, but utterly hacked, penetrated, compromised, whatever adjective you would rather use all of them applies here. Suffice to say that Sony was taken down in such a way that absolutely nothing electronic should be trusted within its environment whether it be a router, switch, desktop, laptop, server down to USB sticks. The hackers had complete control over what seems to be all of their infrastructure and for an indeterminate amount of time.

The adversary, once gaining access began to plunder all of Sony’s secrets, ex-filtrating them out of their networks to the tune of one hundred and eleven terabytes of data. This is an astounding amount of data to take and one has to wonder just how they got it out of there. I mean, did they move it on TB drives? Did they FTP that out? What? You also have to wonder just how long that would take if they were being sneaky about it. It also begs the question of whether or not the attackers had to be sneaky at all because perhaps Sony had not learned it’s lessons from previous attacks and just was not watching traffic at all to see the immense amounts of data leaving their domain.

It gets worse though for Sony… If that were even conceivable to many. The adversary then inserted a special feature to the malware they were using to compromise systems with to destroy the MBR section of hard drives on systems that were infected. This poison pill was then activated when the attackers were done to perform the coup de grâce that would take Sony down hard. As it was described the malware changed the login screen for all the users and then the game was on. Sony knew something was up and then systems went BOOM. Or did they? I am not too sure on this fact because I have not seen much out of Sony as to what happened next.

The net effect here is that Sony cannot trust anything and anyone potentially within their walls and had to shut down their whole network. They handed people pens and pencils and continued working as best they could as they called in Mandiant to perform the incident response for them. Meanwhile, the adversary had made contact with Sony either with the screen change (see below) or other means to say that they had that 111tb of data and laid out terms of what they wanted to not let it out on the net. That was around Nov 24 and it’s now December 6th. Since then there has been two data drops by a group calling themselves the GOP (Guardians of Peace) One drop was small, around a gig and the next was 27 gig. Within those files were found great swaths of Sony data that included numerous SSN’s and personal data for people who worked with or for Sony. In short, it’s a nightmare for all involved really.

Then things got… Weird.

Suddenly Variety (the Hollywood trade rag) was reporting that Sony thought that their adversary was in fact the DPRK and Kim Jong Un. Why? Because Sony was going to release a film that KJU did not appreciate. That film is called “The Interview” and it’s a comedy whose premise is that two Hollywood types are invited to DPRK to interview KJU and are asked “humorously” to whack KJU by the CIA.

Eh.. It could be funny. I really don’t think it would have nor will be but that’s just me. I am not a big fan of the two major stars of the film and of late Hollywood has mostly been the suck anyway, but yeah I digress…

So yeah, Variety is reporting that DPRK hacked Sony and with Mandiant being signed on HOLY CHINA! We all in INFOSEC began popping the popcorn and waiting on Tao to start talking about where DPRK touched him. It was and is still, rather unreal. The modus operandi for some of the hacking does match what DPRK has done before with wiper malware, or shall I say “has been attributed to have done before” and attribution as you all know is hard. However, the data kinda looked like maybe it was possible but with the lens of time it seems less likely that it was a nation state actor especially if the reason for the attack was in fact over this movie.

Since the advent of the DPRK theory, this whole story has just become a media frenzy about “CYBER CYBER CYBER WAR PEARL HARBOR BE AFRAID!!” The reality though seems to be a bit different from the popular media fallderall in that the GOP has all along said that this attack was in response to Sony’s bad practices and they needed to be taken down for them.

The Laughing Man Effect

This is the juncture where the Ghost In The Shell comes in and a certain arc in the story line from the Standalone Complex. If you are a fan you might remember the series of episodes concerning “The Laughing Man” In these episodes we are introduced to a hacker who appears from nowhere and begins a campaign of attacks against corporations for their misdeeds. In particular one company that was colluding in surveillance and stock manipulation but I will leave all that to you to watch.

What happens though is that The Laughing Man takes on the corporation and through hacking exposes them for what they had done as well as effects their bottom line greatly financially as well as damaging their reputation. It was the spectacular nature of the hack though, on live TV in this future Japan that got others completely obsessed with the Laughing Man and what he had done. If you have not seen the series there is a box set of just the episodes that concern the Laughing Man you can watch.

The story line though sparked with me because it showed the great asymmetric power of this kind of warfare that could be carried out by one person. One person with the skill sets to do it, could affect the bottom line of a company at a distance as well as anonymously. This is a powerful thought and one that in today’s society is much more of a reality than ever before and it is precisely because of technology. This idea I personally now call “The Laughing Man Effect” and in tandem with meme’s could spell real trouble for the world today. We have seen this already taking place with Anonymous and their various wars against injustice or just for the lulz as we saw in LulzSec. In fact, I would claim that HB Gary would have been the first instance of the Laughing Man Effect and it just took the Sony incident for it to solidify in my head.

Memetics

Now consider the meme. Meme’s are ideas or images that catch fire with people and are passed on rather like cognitive malware. Anonymous was a meme as well as means of creating and delivering meme’s on the internet. Born of the 4chan boards where meme’s are born every second, some dying on the vine while others catching fire, Anonymous caught on once they went after Scientology. The reality is that Anonymous lit this fire and now GOP has taken up the notion ostensibly and acted upon their personal desires of retribution much like Anon’s did on Scientology.

If the GOP is in fact a real group or person with an agenda to destroy Sony then I believe that their idea has come from Anonymous(s) successes. I also think that if they do really exist as a group then they have learned from Anonymous successes and failures. So far GOP has been pretty cagey with their use of dead drop email accounts and the use of various servers around the globe to send email to reporters. Which, if they are not caught right away, will give them more power of the meme as the David who slew Goliath.

In the end, I believe this to be just the meme taking root in the collective unconscious spurred on by the likes of Anonymous, Snowden, Wikileaks, and the Occupy movements. We live in a time where the small can in fact easily take down the big with technologies that we all use and often times do not secure properly. In the case of Sony it seems that they neglected a lot and got burned badly by doing so. If that is the case then who’s to say when the next big corporation is taken down by another person or persons with an axe to grind or a valid grievance?

The meme is catching and the Laughing Man Effect may be a real concern for the governments and corporations of the world. The more flashy and catchy or perhaps just downright motivational the more chance that others will follow. This is the nature of the meme and it’s ability to propagate so quickly and effectively in our hyper connected world. If you just look at all the media coverage of the Sony incident and then look at all the armchair detection going on around it you can see how this one too has sparked the collective imagination and curiosity.

Future State Electronic Warfare

So here it is. What some have been fearing and perhaps not getting across well enough is coming to pass. In our connected world it is easy to take things down and burn them. I the case of Sony they will come back sure. If you look at their stock the last few days as revelations surfaced, their prices took a dive but then went back up. Perhaps the real world just doesn’t understand the ramifications of what has happened here. However, the fact remains that Sony was completely decimated on a technical level to start. This is an important point that should be thought about.

That Sony was likely hit by an insider is highly probable. Was that insider sent in or actively recruited? Are they someone who just did this because they felt abused? I guess time will tell on these questions but insider attacks have always been a problem and they won’t go away. How do you really protect against that without making life harder for end users? Much more, how do you protect against insider attacks without alienating workers as they are watched every second of the day as they work to insure they aren’t setting off an attack? It’s a vicious cycle really.

Alternatively, how can any company expect to defeat a determined attacker anyway? The dreaded APT’s have had it easy and still do to a large extent but even after we all have learned our lessons, it will still always be a surety that a determined attacker will get you in the end. With that knowledge then what do you do? Do you just accept that fact like something akin to the AA credo of “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change” or do you fight harder? It is a never ending battle.

What Sony can teach us though now is that the idea of this kind of warfare is out there. Ordinary people are feeling empowered to take on corporations and governments with the aid of the very technologies they use to carry on daily business. Technologies that are now commonplace and we cannot do without. This is a scary thing to many in power and it’s been made all the scarier when things like the Sony hack happens so utterly and completely well.

Face it.. We are all PWND six ways to Sunday

Every frigging day we hear more and more about how the NSA has been emptying our lives of privacy and subverting the laws of this land and others with their machinations. It’s true, and I have been saying as much since the day Mr. Klein came out of his telco closet and talked about how the NARUS system had been plugged into the MAE West back in the day. We are all well and truly fucked if we want any kind of privacy today kids and we all need to just sit back and think about that.

*ponder ponder ponder*

Ok, I have thought about it and I have tried to think of any way to protect myself from the encroachment of the NSA and all the big and little sisters out there. I am absolutely flummoxed to come up with any cogent means to really and truly protect my communications. Short of having access to the NSA supercloud and some cryptographers I don’t think that we will not truly have any privacy anymore. If you place it on the net, or in the air. We have reached in my opinion the very real possibility of the N-Dystopia I have talked about before in the Great Cyber Game post.

As the pundits like Schneier and others groan on and on about how the NSA is doing all of this to us all I have increasingly felt the 5 stages of grief. I had the disbelief (ok not completely as you all know but the scope was incredible at each revelation) Then the anger came and washed over me, waves and waves of it as I saw the breadth and scope of the abuse. Soon though that anger went away and I was then feeling the bargaining phase begin. I started to bargain in my head with ideas that I could in fact create my own privacy with crypto and other OPSEC means. I thought I could just deny the government the data. I soon though began to understand that no matter what I did with the tools out there that it was likely they had already been back door’d. This came to be more than the case once the stories came out around how the NSA had been pressuring all kinds of tech companies to weaken standards or even build full back doors into their products under the guise of “National Security”

Over time the revelations have all lead to the inescapable truth that there is nothing really anyone can do to stop the nation state from mining our communications on a technological level. Once that had fully set in my mind the depression kicked in. Of late I have been more quiet online and more depressed about our current state as well as our future state with regard to surveillance and the cyberwarz. I came to the conclusion that no matter the railing and screaming I might do it would mean nothing to the rapidly approaching cyberpocalypse of our own creation arriving. ….In short, we can’t stop it and thus the last of the five stages for me has set in. I accept that there is nothing I can do, nay, nothing “we” can do to stop this short of a bloody coup on the government at large.

I now luxuriate in my apathy and were I to really care any more I would lose my fucking mind.

OPSEC! OPSEC! OPSEC!

Speaking of losing one’s mind.. Lately people all have been yelling that OPSEC is the only way! One (the gruqq) has been touting this and all kinds of counterintelligence as the panacea for the masses on these issues. Well, why? Why should we all have to be spies to just have a little privacy in our lives huh? I mean it’s one thing to be a shithead and just share every fucking stupid idea you have on FriendFace and Tweeter but really, if you can’t shut yourself up that is your problem right? No, I speak of the every day email to your mom telling her about your health status or maybe your decision to come out etc. Why should the government have the eminent domain digitally to look at all that shit now or later?

If you take measures to protect these transactions and those measures are already compromised by the government why then should you even attempt to protect them with overburdened measures such as OPSEC huh? I mean, really if you are that worried about that shit then go talk to someone personally huh? I know, quite the defeatist attitude I have there huh? The reality is that even though I claim not to be caring about it (re: apathy above) I actually do but I realize that we no longer have privacy even if we try to create it for ourselves with technical means. If the gov wants to see your shit they will make a way to do so without your knowing about it. I fully expect someday that they will just claim eminent domain over the internet completely.

Fuck OPSEC.. I want my government to do the right thing and not try to hide all their skirting of the law by making it classified and sending me an NSL that threatens to put me in jail for breaking the law.

Fuck this shit.

CYBERWARZ

Then we have the CYBERWARZ!! Oh yeah, the gubment, the military, and the private sector all have the CYBERWARZ fever. I cannot tell you how sick of that bullshit I am really. I am tired of all the hype and misdirection. Let me clear this up for you all right here and right now. THERE IS NO CYBERWAR! There is only snake oil and espionage. UNTIL such time as there is a full out kinetic war going on where systems have been destroyed or compromised just before tanks roll in or nukes hit us there is no cyberwar to speak of. There is only TALK OF cyber war.. Well more like masturbatory fantasies by the likes of Beitlich et al in reality. So back the fuck off of this shit mmkay? We do not live in the world of William Gibson and NO you are not Johnny Mnemonic ok!

Sick. And. Tired.

I really feel like that Shatner skit where he tells the Trekkies to get a life…

Awaiting the DERPOCALYPSE

All that is left for us all now is the DERPOCALYPSE. This is the end state of INFOSEC to me. We are all going to be co-opted into the cyberwarz and the privacy wars and none of us have a snowball’s chance in hell of doing anything productive with our lives. Some of us are breaking things because we love it. Others are trying to protect “ALL THE THINGS” from the breakers and the people who take their ideas and technologies and begin breaking all those things. It’s a vicious cycle of derp that really has no end. It’s an ouroboros of fail.

RAGE! RAGE! AGAINST THE DYING OF THE PRIVACY! is a nice sentiment but in reality we have no way to completely stop the juggernaut of the NSA and the government kids. We are all just pawns in a larger geopolitical game and we have to accept this. If we choose not to, and many have, then I suggest you gird your loins for the inevitable kick in the balls that you will receive from the government eventually. The same applies for all those companies out there aiding the government in their quest for the panopticon or the cyberwarz. Money talks and there is so much of it in this industry now that there is little to stop it’s abuse as well.

We are well and truly fucked.

So, if you too are feeling burned out by all of this take heart gentle reader. All you need do is just not care anymore. Come, join me in the pool of acceptance. Would you care for a lotus blossom perhaps? It’s all good once you have accepted the truth that there is nothing you can do and that if you do things that might secure you then you are now more of a target. So, do nothing…

CYBER CYBER CYBER!

CYBER CYBER CYBER! or “CRY HAVOC AND LET SLIP THE DIGITAL DOGS OD CYBER WAR!”” is often what you hear from me in a mocking tone as I scan the internet and the news for the usual cyber-douchery. Well this time kids I am actually going to review a book that for once was not full of douchery! Instead it was filled with mostly good information and aimed at people who are not necessarily versed at all in the cyberz. I personally was surprised to find myself thinking that I would approve this for a syllabus (as it has been placed into one by someone I know and asked me to read this and comment)

The book really is a primer on IW (Information Warfare) and Cyber-Warfare (for lack of a better nomenclature for it) which many of you reading my blog might be way below your desired literacy level on the subjects. However, for the novice I would happily recommend that they read the book and then spend more time using ALL of the footnotes to go and read even more on the subject to get a grasp of the complexities here. In fact, I would go as far as to say to all of you out there that IF you are teaching this subject at all then you SHOULD use this book as a starting point.

I would also like to say that I would LOVE to start a kickstarter and get this book into the hands of each and every moron in Congress and the House. I would sit there and MAKE them read it in front of me *surely watching their lips move as they do so* There are too many people in positions of power making stupid decisions about this stuff when they haven’t a single clue. I guess the same could be said about the military folks as well. We have plenty of generals who have no idea either.. That’s just one man’s opinion though.

As we move further and further down the cyber-war road I think that books like this should be mandatory reading for all military personnel as well as college level courses in not only IW/INFOSEC but also political and affairs of state majors as well. We will only continue down this road it seems and it would be best for us all if the next wave of digital natives had a real grasp of the technologies as well as the political, logical, and tactical aspects of “Cyber”

I have broken down the book into rough chapters and subject areas as it is within the book (mostly) It really does cover more of the overall issues of cyber-warfare and methods used (not overly technical) The modus operandi so to speak of the actual events that have taken place are laid out in the book and give you a picture of the evolving of IW to what we see today as “cyber-warfare” I will comment on those sections on what I thought was good and what I thought was derpy of course, I mean would you all have it any other way?

IW (INFORMATION WARFARE) RUSSIA

The authors cover early IW with the Russian saga’s over Georgia and Estonia. There is a lot in there that perhaps even you out there might not know about the specifics of the incidents where Russia is “alleged” to have attacked both countries at different times with different goals and effects. Much of this also touches on the ideas of proxy organizations that may or may not be state run that were a part of the action as well as a good overview of what happened.

In the case of Georgia it went kinetic and this is the first real “cyber-warfare” incident in my mind as cyber-war goes. I say this because in my mind unless there is an actual kinetic portion to the fighting there is no “war” it is instead an “action” or “espionage” so in the case of tanks rolling in on Georgia we have a warfare scenario outright that was in tandem with IW/CW actions.

OUR CHINESE OVERLORDS

Ah Chairman Meow… What book on Cyber would be complete without our friends at the MSS 3rd Directorate huh? Well in the case of this primer it gets it right. It gets across not only that China has been hacking the living shit out of us but also WHY they are doing it! The book gives a base of information (lots of footnotes and links) to ancillary documentation that will explain the nature of Chinese thought on warfare and more to the point Cyber-Warfare. The Chinese have been working this angle (The Thousand Grains of Sand etc) for a long time now and there are more than a few treatises on it for you to read after finishing this book.

The big cases are in there as well as mention of the malware used, goals of the attacks and some of the key players. If you are out to start teaching about Chinese electronic/cyber/IW then this is a good place to start. Not too heavy but it gets the point across to those who are not so up to speed on the politics, the tech, or the stratagems involved.

ANONYMOUS/SEA/LULZSEC

Anonymous, as someone on my Twitter feed was just asking me as I was writing this piece, is also a part of this picture as well. The idea of asymmetric online warfare is really embodied by these groups. The book focuses more on Lulzsec and their 50 days of sailing but it doesn’t go too in depth with the derp. Suffice to say that all of them are indeed important to cyber-warfare as we know it and may in fact be the end model for all cyber-warfare. How so? Well, how better to have plausible denyability than to get a non state group to carry out your dirty war? Hell, for that matter how about just blame them and make it look like one of their ops huh?

Oddly enough just days ago Hammond wrote a piece saying this very thing. He intoned that the FBI via Sabu were manipulating the Anon’s into going after government targets. This is not beyond comprehension especially for places like China as well. So this is something to pay attention to. However, this book really did not take that issue on and I really wished that they had. Perhaps in the next updated edition guys?

THE GRID

OY VEY, the “GRID” this is one of the most derpy subjects usually in the media as well as the books/talks/material on cyber-warfare out there. In this case though I will allow what they wrote stand as a “so so” because they make no real claim to an actual apocalypse. Instead the book talks about the possible scenarios of how one could attack the grid. This book makes no claim that it would work but it is something to think about especially if you have an army of trained squirrels with routers strapped to their backs.

It is my belief that the system is too complex to have a systematic fail of apocalypse proportions and it always has been so. If the book talked about maybe creating a series of EMP devices placed at strategic high volume transformers then I would say they’d be on to something. However, that said, the use of a topological attack model was a good one from a logical perspective. They base most of this off of the Chinese grad students paper back years ago so your mileage may vary. So on this chapter I give it a 40% derp.

WHAT’S MISSING?

All in all I would have liked to have seen more in the political area concerning different countries thought patterns on IW/CW but hey, what can ya do eh? Additionally I think more could have been done on the ideas of offense vs. defense. Today I see a lot of derp around how the US has a GREAT OFFENSIVE CAPABILITY! Which for me and many of you out there I assume, leads me to the logical thought conclusion of “GREAT! We are totally offensive but our defense SUCKS!” So much for CYBER-MAD huh?

I would have also like to have seen more in the way of some game theory involved in the book as well concerning cyber-warfare. Some thought experiments would be helpful to lay out the problems within actually carrying out cyber-war as well as potential outcomes from doing so more along the lines of what I saw in the Global Cyber-Game.

OVERALL TAKE

Well, in the end I think it is a good start point for people to use this in their syllabus for teaching IW/CW today. It is a primer though and I would love to see not only this end up on the list but also the Global Cyber Game as well to round out the ideas here. To me it is more about “should we do this?” as opposed to “LETS FUCKING DO THIS!” as the effects of doing so are not necessarily known. Much of this territory is new and all too much of it is hyped up to the point of utter nonsense. This is the biggest problem we have though, this nonsense level with regard to the leaders of the land not knowing anything about it and then voting on things.

We need a more informed populace as well as government and I think this book would be a good start. So to the person who asked me to review this..

Cyberspace;It’s a medium, not a place.

Much hay has been made over the use of the term “Cyberspace” since all this talk about cyberwar has been bandied about. I for one have also been one of the more vocal personages yelling online and off about the use of the term or more to the point its over-use and lack of real context. I consider it a bit of a pet peeve really but I started to think about it much more recently and think that it’s time to put down some ideas that have been in my head about cyberspace.

Lately I have been focusing more on the cognitive, social, and psychological issues surrounding the human animal and the technological interface that we have created for communicating with one another. The Internet was born with the idea of sharing data and to connect systems (nuclear weapons primarily) during a time of war after regular infrastructure may be destroyed. It has morphed since then to encompass much more of our daily lives. Not only from the methods we use to pay our bills but also sociologically by the invention of social media.

Along the way we humans also created a mystique around this new technology that was futuristic and cool. The name that was coined for this ideal was put forth before the Internet was born by William Gibson in his book “Neuromancer” It was this presaging of the idea that not only would we someday in the future be able to communicate with people on a network of computers, but also that we would actually live on the “net” In Gibson’s universe people “jacked” into the net and left their bodies behind for a digital domain with imagery that felt real and technologies that could kill your physical body while you were linked to cyberspace.

It was really from this coining of the term and it’s cool factor that it began to catch on as we developed the technologies of the Internet and the means to interface with it more graphically. Hackers gravitated to the word as well as war fighters early on but it really did not not the modern lexicon until more recent times with the advent of APT (Advanced Persistent Threats) and Stuxnet where malware and espionage met and small conflicts were waged. Suddenly the sexiness of Cyber which really also more commonly was used with the term “sex” after it became the word of the day and once tagged with war became the de facto term for a new kind of warfare.

…. But, lets go back to this notion of “cyber” being a place. Is it in fact a place? Can one inhabit it? Or is it just a medium by which data is passed between systems and people to communicate? I would say that both of the latter are the reality and that clothing the medium in a sexy terminology leads to too many misapprehensions about the realities of what exactly is going on when one goes to war in it. As if anyone really can.

Sociology & Linguistics:

While the internet was originally conceived as a network to send data and communicate between systems it has become much more societally today to us all. It is the primary means of communication for people via phones, computers, and other types of interfaces. It is this fact, that moreover the social aspects of the internet and its important to society have become the primacy that we need to investigate it as a mirror to our natures. It is our nature that is effecting the direction of the technology from what we are doing on it as well as how we are doing it.

In the realm of the information security world I have been moving more and more away from the strict notions of defense and offense via technological means alone toward a more comprehensive understanding of the why and the how of the adversary’s aegis instead of primarily looking at the vulnerabilities and the outcomes of their being used. This shift for me has widened the scope quite a bit and it became clear to me that by looking at the problem between the keyboard and the computer is a key to a better 360 degree process that we could use to manage our vulnerabilities more effectively. By studying these new sciences (Cyber-Psychology & Cyber-Sociology) I think that we can get a much better handle on creating a more secure environment to start as well as a more holistic means to information security on the whole.

Once again, the medium is just the means of communication though that does evolve the communication and lay the groundwork for social change. Mores, ideas, and language all effect the society broadly. In this case the medium of the internet or “cyberspace” as a modality is having real world consequences due to the hyper connected nature of it all today. Ponder the future connectivity as we move from Web 2.0 to 3.0 as well. How much more will the medium, which now can effect our daily lives in good as well as terrible ways directly enable us to further or destroy society up to the physical in the case of infrastructure (grid security etc.

Cognitive Dissonance:

The key point that I want to make in this first of perhaps a few blog posts on all of these ideas is that the human behind the keyboard is just as important if not more important than the keyboard and CPU they wield. It is also important to set forth that cyberspace is only a place in the cognitive dissonance that we are all deluding ourselves into believing. In reality cyberspace is in fact what is between our ears and the internet is a medium with which we fabricate a social contract to communicate with each other, transfer data with, and potentially wage war.

By understanding the tool user and their motivations you can understand the tool.